Complete Guide to Using RedTrack – The #1 Alternative to Voluum

As the new year starts, I’ve looked back at the things I’ve set out to do and stacked them up against the things I actually did over the past year. It was a successful year, and I really can say that most of my goals for 2018 were met. That being said, you can never be completely satisfied with the things you’ve done and in the spirit of that, I think I could have done a better job sharing my experiences and knowledge in terms of strategies, tools and the overall mindset that helped me achieve my goals. That’s why this post shall be another great start for this year!

Again, looking back at the posts on my blog, I noticed that even though we switched to RedTrack, I never really posted a detailed guide on it and presented you with all the nuances that make it a complete solution for our tracking. The other thing I noticed is that most of my posts assume that you are already somewhat proficient in setting up ad campaigns and are familiar with intermediate techniques. I took the time to really simplify my approach and help even absolute beginners with a guide that they’ll able to use knowing almost nothing going in. I’ll start with the basics and hopefully, touch one very detail that might throw a wrench in your gears along the way. Let’s get to it then!

In order to be able to fully appreciate the functionality and the simplicity RedTrack offers, you have to understand the basics of ad tracking in general. The beauty of affiliate marketing is that everything can be tracked, and everything can be tweaked. That beauty translates into value,and value translates into money. For the purpose of this explanation, if you skip the middle steps; quality tracking translates into more money earned,provided you don’t actually skip those middle steps.

Tracking can be defined as recording every action connected to your ad including clicks, conversions, and sales and storing them as data you can read, interpret, and make adjustments accordingly. It’s almost like having your friend taking the test before you do in high school and then telling you all the questions, even including some of the answers. Essentially, a marketing campaign’s success depends on this data. So, for affiliates, tracking is basically a “proof of work” that determines how your traffic convert, how many meaningful actions they perform. and ultimately, how much money you made.

Tracking solutions (software and services) are used to setup and manage tracking tasks. It’s basically a connection between marketers and advertisers that serves to determine actual revenue for both parties.

1.1 IMPORTANCE OF TRACKER FOR AFFILIATES

To paint a picture; imagine marketers (guys who are promoting) and advertisers (guys who are getting promoted) as a team of bomb disposal specialists disarming a really big bomb. Tracking would be the thing that enables them to see the color of each individual wire and lets them know which one to cut to complete their tasks and walk out alive. Without tracking,yes they can cut wires and sometimes they will get lucky and disarm that bomb,but most of the time, this random method ends in a disaster.

Now to continue with the metaphor, I’ll quickly explain basic tracking terms and point out their importance.

CPA (the red wire) also known as cost per acquisition or cost per action. It’s a metric that determines the value of a certain action like a click, sale, form submission, etc. If a marketer has a specified value for each action, a tracker is in charge of counting those actions.

CPC (the blue wire) also known as cost per click. It’s ametric that determines the value of a visitor clicking on the publisher’s ad. Again, it’s the tracker that counts those clicks and tracks other important details like browser type, geo-tag, traffic origin, etc.

CPI (the green wire) also known as cost per impression. The same logic applies here and tracker is again in charge of counting those impressions. One common acronym you’ll see is CPM which is basically the same thing only tracked in through thousand impressions.

There are other expressions used and I’ll explain each of them as I use them.

So, let’s tie it all together. The entire affiliate platform depends on the tracker’s ability to accurately measure every action in the chain. And both publishers (marketers) and advertisers depend on this data for valuable insights into the sales and conversion rates, giving them the ability to decide “which wires to cut” to maximize their chances for success.

1.2 MECHANICS BEHIND TRACKING

By now, you should have a rough idea what tracking is, but you might have no clue how it actually works. Well, it’s magic. It’s a special ability only a few can use with success and it’s really hard to learn!

And for a special price of a $1.000.000 I can teach you…

Obviously, I was kidding! 😄

But you can still send me a million bucks if you found that amusing. 😉

Anyhow, the tracking mechanism is quite simple. It involves putting in a couple of lines of code and letting the tracking software do the rest. It’s basically a copy-paste-and-done type of deal. And the code is provided by the tracking software (I’ll showcase it as we go through the step by step later) so you don’t even have to understand it all.

Using that code, the software tracks all the relevant
metrics and displays them in the dashboard as simple data points you can use to
track a visitor from start to finish (before and after included).

And that’s it!

So, all the magic happens in those few lines of code?

Well, yes and no. Yes, tracking is that simple, but what comes after that requires some understanding of the metrics themselves. We will come to that during a step by step.

I guess by now you are ready to actually learn how and why we use RedTrack and what makes it our main tracking solution?